1. Technical Field
This disclosure relates to migrating data and associated data mapping between complex systems.
2. Related Art
Rapid developments in modern technology have given rise to the extraordinary growth, widespread adoption, and immense complexity of database systems. Today, database systems are critical components of the computer systems that handle almost every type of service, electronic commerce, and information processing in the global marketplace. Yet, despite all of the improvements in database technology over the years, database systems still face significant technological challenges.
One technical challenge is data migration. In most cases, a database for one processing system is created and customized without particular regard to databases already in existence in other processing systems. As a result, in order for the processing systems to exchange information and before the valuable data captured by a legacy processing system may be integrated into a new processing system, a complex data mapping document must be prepared. The data mapping document has the difficult role of establishing mappings between legacy system database tables and intermediate staging tables in an effort to ensure compliance with the way that the new processing system database stores the same data.
In the past, creating the data mapping document was an immensely labor intensive, complex, and error prone endeavor. One part of the challenge comes from the fact that even a moderately complex database may have thousands of intermediate staging tables to choose from. Another part of the challenge arises in that the author of the data mapping document had to resolve immense disparities between databases, manually consult extensive sets of documentation to understand data types, formats, and database tables, and construct the data mapping document by hand. The complexity led to frequent errors which led lead to frequent rework of the data mapping document and additional poisonous drudgery before a usable data mapping document resulted. It is also difficult to find and retain individuals with superior data mapping skills. Accordingly, achieving a system migration with existing staff and within a desired time frame is an ever increasing challenge.
Therefore, a need exists for a data mapping document design system and design tool that address the problems noted above and other previously encountered.